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In a town as small as Bugswick, Malcolm’s surprised it’s taken this long for him to bump into his self-proclaimed archnemesis. He just didn’t think the bumping into part would be so literal.
There’s orange juice spreading down the front of his shirt, seeping into the cracked tiles of the grocery store, and a bruise forming on his backside that probably would have been worse if it weren’t for the loaf of bread that broke his fall. He draws the squished loaf out from beneath him and frowns. He was going to make ham and cheese sandwiches with that.
A muttered curse draws his attention, and he looks up to find high top curls and brown eyes. The source of his grocery catastrophe.
Peter Tollemache sits in an inelegant heap on the floor, legs spread out like a newborn giraffe while his groceries (an unfortunate amount of soup products) marinate in his lap. Malcolm throws his head back and groans, clenching his eyes shut to block out the buzzing fluorescent lights that have only been adding to his growing annoyance since this situation began. Malcolm brings his head back down when he hears Peter let out a pointedly long-suffering sigh.
“Were you dropped on the head as a kid?” Peter asks slowly, his voice low and livid.
Peter clenches his jaw, then swipes his tongue over his teeth. He does that when he’s especially irritated. Malcolm noticed it in college. Peter had seemed to hate Malcolm’s guts before they’d even had the chance to exchange pleasantries, so Malcolm ended up wasting hours of precious study time glaring at Peter across the room instead, as if staring at the backside of his head would somehow unlock the mystery of what crawled up his ass and died there. It’s a puzzle Malcolm has long since given up on solving.
“You’re the one who bumped into me, asshole,” Malcolm barks back, gathering his groceries in his arms.
“God, this is gonna take ages to get out,” Peter mumbles, like a prick. An employee with impressively dark bags under their eyes comes by and hands him several paper towels. Peter is considerably nicer to the worker than he is to Malcolm, accepting the help with a quiet nod and a soft thanks.
Malcolm waits for Peter to use up his share of paper towels and hand over the extra, but he seems content to use every piece for himself. Malcolm can feel the orange juice seeping further into his shirt and down his chest. It starts to drip down to his boxers, and he bristles.
“Hey,” Malcolm says, but Peter ignores him, using the rest of the paper towels to wipe at his jeans. Half of them are still dry. Malcolm reaches out to grab one, but Peter holds it out of the way. “Hey! I need some of those!”
“Go ask for more, then,” Peter says without a second glance to Malcolm. He continues to pat down his legs and arms, the latter of which had been most certainly untouched by the soup. He’s doing this on purpose.
“This wouldn’t have happened if you’d just watch where you’re going,” Malcolm says, hoping the venom in his voice disguises the fact that he isn’t actually sure who bumped into whom. Malcolm’s friends know how oblivious and clumsy he can be, but Peter doesn’t know that, and Malcolm doesn’t intend to apologize now that he’s blamed Peter so vehemently.
After a lot more paper towels and twice as much complaining, Malcolm finally pays for his items (ignoring Peter’s dirty looks from the aisle over) and marches down the street toward his apartment with his groceries in hand, including a new carton of orange juice and the squished loaf of bread that seems to be steadily un-squishing itself.
Malcolm pulls out his phone and opens up the only group chat on his messaging app. It’s currently titled Got Bees? He suspects Jazz is the one who changed the name.
you will not believe what just happened
Goby’s phone is perpetually attached to their palm when they aren’t working, so their reply comes the quickest.
A HEIST!!!
You think everything is a heist, Goob, Mona texts back.
nah i agree with goby. it’s definitely a heist this time, Jazz says.
THANK YOU JAZMINE, Goby says, and before anyone can reply, they shoot out another text:
someone is probably on their way to
steal the queens jewels...its up to you
to save the country mal...SAVE US ALL!!!!
goby, we don’t have a queen
yea we do she’s right here, Jazz replies.
The text is followed by a picture Jazz seems to have just taken of Mona. It’s slightly blurry; Jazz must have snuck the photo before Mona noticed. Mona’s socked feet are propped up on Jazz’s lap, Jazz’s hand resting gently on her ankle. Mona’s smiling absently at her own phone.
Aw, my darling, Mona replies, along with several heart emojis.
BARF, Goby says, NOT IN FRONT OF THE CHILD
what child?
ME!
don’t be a homophobe, Jazz says.
homo-gobe, Goby replies. It takes Malcolm a second to realize they were trying to make a play on their own name. It didn’t work.
that was awful, Jazz says.
that was genius, Goby replies.
all of you give me gray hairs.
Malcolm takes a second look at the photo Jazz sent to the chat and grins, saving it to his phone. Mona and Jazz are sitting comfortably on his old pea-green leather couch, a hand-me-down from his cousin that he had to convince Goby and Mona to let him keep in their shared apartment. The black Ragamuffin Malcolm rescued several years back, lovingly named Lady Governor, can be made out in the corner of the screen, her tail brushing against the golden-brown skin of Mona’s leg.
Despite the warmth in his chest, he can’t help but tease them:
if you do anything on my couch
i’m kicking you both out
Malcolm, sweetheart, I adore you, but I would rather die than do anything of the sort on this thing, Mona says.
Malcolm’s jaw drops, even as he feels his lips draw up into a smile against his will. He clicks the group FaceTime button, rearranging his expression until he looks more offended than he really feels. Everyone answers right away, their faces popping up onto the screen one by one.
“It’s not that bad!” Malcolm says immediately, adjusting his grip on the groceries so he can hold them all in one hand and the phone in the other. “She’s just a little worn out, that’s all!”
“Malcolm, this thing has, like, eighteen holes in it,” Jazz says. She turns the camera towards her hand, where he can see one of her ringed fingers start to dig into a hole in his couch. Her finger sinks through to the knuckle. “It’s dead meat, dude. Pretty sure I can feel it deteriorating under my ass. You’re lucky I’m not dragging it out to the curb right now.”
“I think it’s charming,” Goby chimes in, close enough to the camera that the bottom half of their face gets cut off. Malcolm can tell that they’re smiling from their squinty eyes and the risen apples of their cheeks, pale and freckled.
“Of course you would,” Jazz says, “you’d call a dirty sewer tire ‘perfectly delightful!’” Jazz waves her hand into the air and puts on a voice that’s probably supposed to be an imitation of Goby, but sounds more like some kind of Muppet.
Goby starts to say something along the lines of “I’ll show you perfectly delightful,” when Mona cuts in.
“What was it you wanted to tell us, Malcolm?” Mona says, a laugh in her voice as her socked foot emerges from the corner of Jazz’s portion of the screen and pokes at her cheek. Jazz swats it away, wrinkling her nose, and Mona sticks her tongue out in return.
“Right, yeah,” Malcolm says right as he gets the keys into the apartment door and swings through. Mona, Jazz and Goby look up at the sound of his entrance. “You will never guess who I ran into at the grocery store.”
“The President,” Goby guesses from where they sit on the countertop of the kitchen island. Lady Governor tries stubbornly to catch one of the drawstrings from Goby’s sweatpants with her paws as Goby swings their feet back and forth. Goby wiggles their toes at her, and Lady Governor latches onto their ankle.
“No, not the President,” Malcolm says, pinching lightly and affectionately at Goby’s ear as he passes. They huff and kick out at his leg, which he just barely manages to swivel around before he can trip and drop his groceries. Again.
“Steve Buscemi,” Jazz shouts out a guess. She’s risen from her spot on the couch to replace the album that was playing on the living room record player (something by The Who, Malcolm thinks) with a new one.
“Uh, no, not quite,” Malcolm says, unpacking the groceries just as The Clash begins to play. Jazz is familiar enough with the album to know exactly where to place the needle, and Malcolm isn’t surprised when the distinct notes of “Brand New Cadillac” start to fill the room. Jazz bops her head to the beat as she returns to the couch, this time sitting herself between Mona’s legs so that her back rests against Mona’s chest.
“Was it Mr. Lu?” Mona asks as she wraps her arms around Jazz’s middle. Jazz’s locs have been wrapped into a bun at the top of her head, so Mona rests her chin on Jazz’s shoulder in order to better look at Malcolm.
“Thank you for the proper guess, Mona. This is why you’re my favorite,” Malcolm says, ignoring Goby’s indignant gasp. Mr. Lu works at the only Asian supermarket in town. He has a mean face, but that never fools the people who have grown to know him. He has a granddaughter named Miranda that he loves to spoil, and he brags about her to any customer willing to listen. Malcolm and the rest of the group have always had a soft spot for the old man. “He’s not who I wanted to talk about, but I actually did run into him on the way home; he’s invited us to Miranda’s soccer game next week.”
“Score,” Goby says earnestly. “Free snow cones.”
“No snow cones until the players get them first this time, you cretin,” Jazz says, pointing a stern finger at Goby.
“They’ll take all the good flavors!” Goby complains.
“They’re eleven!”
“Back to me,” Malcolm says, and everyone returns their attention to him (except for Lady Governor, who is now leaning over the top of the couch to paw at one of the many pins and patches on Jazz’s jean jacket). “I ran into...” Malcolm pauses, letting the suspense build. “Peter Tollemache.”
The others blink.
“Who?” Mona says.
“Your college crush?” Jazz says, her lips quirking up.
Malcolm flusters, sputtering out a number of nonsensical half-words before he can get out a full sentence. “What? I’m—I didn’t—no. I did not have—” Malcolm realizes his voice has climbed up in volume and quickly lowers it. “I did not have a crush on Peter Tollemache.” He spits out the name like a particularly sour orange slice, then scoffs. “He hates me.”
“This is the guy you stare at all the time, yeah?” Goby says, hopping down from the kitchen island. They grab an apple out of the fridge and bite into it with a satisfying crunch. When Malcolm furrows his eyebrows at them, they continue through a mouthful of chewed up Honeycrisp, “Whenever he’s out on a run you stare at the dude like he’s got sunbeams shooting out of his butt.”
“I only stare at him because he hates me!” Malcolm says, and he curses when he feels the burn of a blush at the tips of his ears. “We’re enemies.”
“If you’re enemies, why don’t you just ignore him?” Mona says. Her voice is smooth and warm, like tea and honey. She sounds so sensible, and it frustrates Malcolm to no end when he just wants to be irrational.
He turns to unpack the rest of his groceries while he thinks of a good reason for his actions, but before he can, Jazz interrupts.
“You just hate the thought of anyone not liking you, huh?” Jazz says with a sly grin.
Malcolm grumbles, “You know for a fact that plenty of people have hated me over the course of my life. You’ve seen it yourself.”
This is true. Jazz is the only one in the group who has known Malcolm since before college. They’d become friends in elementary school, when Malcolm had told her he didn’t think it was weird that she wanted to kiss girls like boys did, and she had let him borrow her beanie to tuck his hair up into since his mother refused to cut it any shorter than shoulder length.
They were also the first people either of them had come out to.
“Do you know what transgender means?” Jazz had asked at a sleepover with Malcolm in middle school, back when she still regularly went by Jazmine instead of Jazz.
Malcolm was standing in front of his floor length mirror, tying his mother’s scarf around his chest to see if it would make him look a bit more like his male classmates. He put a hoodie on top, but it just made him look like he was hiding lumpy grocery bags under his shirt. He glanced at Jazz through the mirror, but she wasn’t looking at him. She was reading a book on his bed, her legs crossed and her tight curls pushed out of her face with a headband. He couldn’t see the full title of the book from where he stood, but he thought he saw the words “and Human Sexuality” peeking out from behind her hands. He had never seen the book in his house, so she must have brought it with her.
“I don’t think so,” Malcolm said, slumping when the scarf unraveled and fell out from the bottom of his hoodie.
Jazz had explained the term to him, reading the definition straight out of the book. Then she talked about a relative of hers who was transgender, and how he had transitioned after high school. Throughout the whole conversation, she kept her eyes on her book, overly casual. Now Malcolm knows that her feigned disinterest in the conversation had been her way of being supportive.
“Huh,” Malcolm had said when she was finished. “That...that sounds like me.”
“Okay,” Jazz had said, finally looking up from the book.
Malcolm had shuffled over to Jazz, sitting daintily on the edge of the bed. He blinked once, then said, “I think I’m transgender.”
Jazz had smiled and said, “Alright. I think I’m a lesbian.”
They spent the rest of the night watching Labyrinth (Jazz’s favorite), and fell asleep holding each other. Malcolm asked to borrow Jazz’s book the next day, and he read all about bisexuality, eventually coming to terms with that side of his identity as well. (Malcolm wouldn’t come out to anyone else for years, as either trans or bi—but knowing that Jazz knew, and loved him nonetheless, was enough.)
Many years later, at the start of college, Jazz showed up at Malcolm’s doorstep with that same book, along with a frantic look in her eye.
“I need to figure something out,” she had said, planting herself at his dining room table. She had both the book and her laptop open, and she would periodically switch between the two platforms throughout the evening. Malcolm hadn’t said much; just sat with her while she read, occasionally giving her fruit slices when she went too long without eating.
That night, she came out as asexual. (Malcolm needed a bit of explanation about the difference between sexual and romantic attraction, and how being asexual didn’t make Jazz any less of a lesbian. He did a little more soul searching after that and came to the conclusion that he was definitely still bi—in both the romantic and sexual sense.)
They’ve been together through every identity crisis, through every confusing and frustrating moment. They’ve been there to protect one another from the world when the only people who seemed to care about them were themselves.
The current Jazz softens a bit. Remembering the years of bullying and loneliness they’ve both had to endure, however, isn’t enough to stop her from mocking him when the chance arises, and her insufferable grin grows wider.
Damn. He had hoped pulling the Queer Trauma card would work.
“I’m not talking about high school assholes,” Jazz says to Malcolm. “Peter isn’t a bigot, he just doesn’t like you. But you don’t know why he doesn’t like you, and that bugs the shit out of you, huh?”
Malcolm groans deep in the back of his throat, dragging his hands down his face. “Okay fine, yes, of course it bugs me. Why wouldn’t he like me? I’m a fucking delight!”
“How do you even know he doesn’t like you? I’ve never seen you two actually talk,” Goby says, taking a seat in the chair next to the couch. Malcolm sits himself down on the carpet, leaning his elbows on the coffee table.
“That’s because they don’t talk,” Jazz says. She strokes a hand down Lady Governor’s back as the old cat settles on top of her thighs, and Mona leans forward from behind Jazz to scratch at Lady’s chin. “I think they spoke, like, once in college? But apart from that Malcolm just glares at him.”
“He glares first!” Malcolm flings his arms out for (unneeded) emphasis. “And we didn’t talk. Not until today, that is.”
“You spoke to him?” Mona says, the only one in the group who has yet to tease him about his nemesis. He doesn’t keep his hopes up, though; Mona can be just as bad as the other two, she’s just better at hiding it. The dimple in her cheek tells him she’s finding his dilemma just as amusing as the others.
“More like shouted,” Malcolm says. He scratches at the scruff on his cheek. “I kinda...dumped his soup in his lap.”
“Pardon?” Mona says, eyes wide.
Jazz snorts once before dissolving into a fit of giggles, her whole body moving with the effort, and Lady Governor darts out of her lap to escape the noise. Goby has joined in as well, gripping at their stomach as great big guffaws leave their mouth.
“You fucking what?” Jazz manages to say through an almost painful sounding wheeze.
“I didn’t do it on purpose!” Malcolm insists, his cheeks burning. He tugs at the front of his beanie and pulls it over his eyes. “I always end up zoning out when I’m at the store and I never bump into people, but of course the one time I do it’s my archnemesis! And I tried explaining that it was an accident but he wouldn’t listen, just stole all the damn paper towels for himself.” Okay, the part about him trying to explain himself is a bit of a fib, but they don’t need to know that. It’s basically what happened.
“Well, he is the one who got soup in his lap,” Goby points out. Malcolm rips off his beanie so he can frown at Goby.
“And I got soaked in OJ!” Malcolm says, picking at the sticky front of his shirt where a large stain has developed from the spill. He doesn’t normally wear white shirts in fear of sweat stains (his high school gym class had forced students to wear white shirts that always stained yellow in the pits after the first week), but it was cool enough outside today that he figured stains could be avoided. How foolish he had been.
“I’ve always said you look good in orange,” Mona says, bringing her hand up in a vain attempt to stifle a laugh.
“Monaaa,” Malcolm whines, drawing out the vowels. “Don’t laugh at me, you’re the nice one! You’re supposed to be on my side.”
“Babes, when are you going to learn,” Jazz says, “we will always be on the side that involves laughing at your misfortune.”
Malcolm sighs, making a great big show of it just to be dramatic. (He spots an exaggerated eye roll from Jazz but resolutely ignores it.)
“Alright then, guess I’ll just get fucked,” Malcolm says, standing from the floor.
“You should! Maybe it’ll help you loosen up a bit,” Jazz says, and she laughs as Malcolm picks up a pen and flings it at her head.